When I first started my journalism studies, full of raw, unfocused energy, I desperately cornered Mac McClary one morning outside his office at the Bret Harte House.

“Tell me, Mac,” I said, “What do I strike you as – a newspaper guy, a broadcaster, public relations man … ?”

“—You strike me as a guy who needs to keep his options open,” came Mac’s swift reply. It was classic Mac: straightforward, no-nonsense advice.

For more than 40 years, Mac McClary, who died last weekend, was more than a journalism professor at Humboldt State University. For generations of students, the Mac Daddy wore many hats. With his lean, stooped frame, smooth dome and wise-cracking grin, he was the first face we saw of our future on the path to becoming reporters.

Mac was a mentor, a jokester, a philosopher and sage. While his capacity for puns, the corny aside, could not be described as inexhaustible — in fact, it was part of his legend that he often recycled the same ones over and over, passing them from one class to the next — they were certainly memorable.

“It was Marshall McCluhan who told us, ‘The Medium is the Message,’” he lectured, in his Intro to Media and Mass Communications class. “But I prefer to say, ‘The Medium is the Massage.” This last one, as many of his quips, was not intended to be digested as some kind of Holy Writ on the Media. Rather, I think Mac infused in many of us the importance of keeping a sense of humour. So many journalists, as we would find out ourselves later on, were too serious, hyper-focused on getting the story. It’s important, even vital, to keep your funny bone intact, to keep your perspective, no matter how big the story may be (or, as so often turns out, may not be).

“Remember, a newspaper, at the end of the day, is something most people use to wrap their fish with,” he reminded us, on more than one occasion.

In the newsroom at The Lumberjack, we used to keep a running tab of the latest quip or Mac-ism that would pop up (or pop up again): “Some people say I’m a Giants fan. But I prefer to think of myself as a Rather Large Air Conditioner.”

Giants fan or not, there could be no denying his passion for the San Jose Sharks (a Sharks win would prompt an emphatic jaw-clomping display the next day in front of the class), or his enthusiasm for running. The picture of Mac, in shorts, T-shirt and trainers, jogging around the track at Redwood Bowl , was a morning campus fixture even after he retired and became a professor emeritus in his seventies.

But there was more to Mac than laid-back, joking professor. He made his bones on the daily newspaper circuit in Southern California, and never lost the game edge of a newspaperman. He still devoured the news every morning, and was often a source and guide for local area reporters. He was the author of “Issues in Journalism: A Discussion Guide for News Media Ethics,” and a sound, jocular raconteur of American journalism history.

As an up-and-coming journalist, you valued his insight and direction. Even after you’d graduated, and moved on, as I did, into daily newspaper journalism, you valued these things even more. For instance, when I first attended his classes, in the late Nineties, Mac as much as anybody warned us to prepare for what was then called The Merge, or the coming together of traditional media with the then-exploding Internet. Here we are, not so many years later, and I’m writing this memorial – fittingly – to an online publication, from halfway around the world. You saw it coming, Mac.

It has been nearly 15 years since I last attended one of his lessons in Founders’ Hall. His grainy-voiced lectures, the groan-and-guffaw-inducing jokes, have dimmed and faded.

But one thing that he said stays with me. We were talking about frontier-era newspapers, the Wild West press, in a media history class one day. “Newspapers should be both entertaining and enlightening,” he said, passing on the shoot-from-the-hip ethos of that long vanished era. I think Mac, for the most part, agreed. Certainly, his lectures (and even his jokes) were that, entertaining and enlightening.

At the end of the day, it is that morning at Bret Harte House that I most fondly recall: “You strike me as a guy who needs to keep his options open.”

So I did: Thanks, Mac. Where ever you are now, I’m sure you must be grinning that sly, crusty grin of yours. You were right. It’s advice that has carried me from The Lumberjack, to the Times-Standard, and on to a freelance career in Prague and Istanbul. It’s advice that I’m sure he would continue to pass on to generations of students – journalism or otherwise. Oh, and remember, the Medium is not the Message. It’s the Massage all the way.

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James Tressler, a former Lost Coast resident and 2001 Humboldt State University graduate, is a freelance writer and teacher. He lives in Istanbul.